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NASA Downgrades Asteroid-Earth Collision Risk
coondoggie writes "NASA scientists have recalculated the path of a large asteroid known as Apophis and now say it has only a very slim chance of banging into Earth.. The Apophis asteroid is approximately the size of two-and-a-half football fields, and updated computational techniques and newly available data indicate the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036 for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a million, NASA stated."
Isn't four in a million the same as one in 250,000 ?
At the very minimum, pay for dinner.
Is it really that hard to use the same intial number for 2 ratios? I mean honestly... 1 in 250,000 is much easier to compare to 1 in 45k than 4 in 1million
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
Man, that's a lot of Astro-Glide.
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>two-and-a-half football fields
So is that US football fields or are we using the metric system (ie. Soccer fields) ?
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
How about 1 in 250,000?
And "two football fields" doesn't tell us much about the thing's actual size. Besides "football" having two different meanings, one of which has multiple field sizes, what kind of volume are we looking at here?
It's a million-to-one chance, but it might just work!
They better be careful with those odds... that's dangerously close to a one-in-a-million chance, which everyone knows happen ALL THE TIME...!
Even the chance of an apocalypse is being downsized.
We're all going to die.
I guess that means I'm still going to need to worry about the Y2k38 problem.
Can we keep our units/ratios consistent?
When you're regurgitating statistics that are generally considered good news - such as the decreased chance of global catastrophe - doesn't it seem reasonable to make those statistics intelligible?
April 13 is my birthday, and there's something ironically awesome about the world being destroyed on one's birthday.
Want to improve your life? This guy will show you how!
The Earth's population is estimated at 6.789 billion. So statistically, this asteroid is going to kill 27,156 people?
Clearly 4 in a *million* must be a very very small number, not like 1 in 250000 - which has thousands on the right-hand side, so that can't be good.
In an attempt to make a new probability "less scary" the authors (or summary writers) also commit a specific error - there is only ONE asteroid so any probability related to it is ALWAYS 1 in something. It can never be 4 in something because there is only once chance of collision.
Apohpis? Everybody knows it was Anubis who sent the asteroid.
Just cut the red wire (but they're all yellow!)
Yep, plan 3 works every time.
So the change was downgraded to 18% chance that the original value of 0.0022% was right.
So we've gone from a two in 90,000 chance of being whacked upside the head 27 years from now to a one in two hundred-fifty thousand chance.
Great
What is the real use in this? When, within reasonable (I'm not a scientist, but lets use an 85% confidence interval) levels of knowing, would we be able to determine that in fact, yes, this thing is or is not going to hit us? It's certainly not now, 27 years prior. Is it a year prior? six months? A month? A day? And, once we reach that date, do we have the resources/funding to have a defense system or contingency plan set up in time? Knowing chances and all is great, but we're not going to build a bruce willis-mobile 27 years in the future.
The article states that they aren't being given the funding to further fund research centers for adequate testing. Politics aside - is there any funding (and more importantly, scientific viability) for preventative action for any of this, or are we just providing confidence intervals of our ultimate doom?
No worries, Daniel, O'Neil, Sam and Tiel'c will take care of it.
Given that it is supposed to hit in 2036, isn't it too early to be able make accurate predictions ? I mean, I am sure these predicted probabilities will keep changing as it gets closer ( assuming its headed in our direction right now ). I mean, who knows if the path of the asteroid may deviate a little bit due to gravitational pull of different planets/stars etc
one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a million.... um, they mean from 1-in-45k to 1-in-250k, but gosh darn it! They found a way to say "X in a million chance!"
Because Jack O'Neil's getting too old to stop those Goald asteriods.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I thought we killed that asshole at the end of season 3?!
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
Was NASA hoping for a naquadah-filled explosive asteroid?
they crashed a $125 million orbiter into Mars because they mixed up metric and imperial units... so im not trusting their math ;)
They're equivalent. It doesn't matter.
Don't worry, it just means you'll be prepared in plenty of time for when the Y2K38 bug causes civilization to collapse.
We won't have to file taxes by April 15 in 2036, or possibly ever again. Death 1, Taxes 0.
Hope is the currency of fools
One in a million chances come true 9 out of ten times STOP REFINING!!
available data indicate the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036
Notice how this is well beyond the next election cycle. That way, when it turns out the odds are really 1:1, the current Incumbents can't be held accountable.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
it's four in a million, because we all know that one in a million chance events happen nine times out of ten.
We've got those laser defenses, with the castles. As long as we keep blasting them we'll earn enough points to keep getting new laser cannons! Or was that for the alien invaders.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
People keep buying lottery tickets.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Forget the "solar flares", maybe next few decade's excuse could be something like:
"Sorry, but the holosite is unavailable due to a large meteor. No ma'm, it didn't strike earth, our datacenter was on the moon."
That's funny. Too bad you posted anonymously and are buried behind about fifty "Why didn't they say 1 in 250,000?!" redundant posts.
<Complete your profile by adding a signature!>
The real question is, will Bruce Willis still be alive and fit enough for an emergency space mission?
Born: March 19, 1955. That will put him at 81 years old... We better freeze him now, so we can thaw him out in case of an impending asteroid strike.
that the lotto.
Are these Hollywood sized football fields
But I feel somehow disappointed.
Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission
"Feynman was clearly disturbed by the fact that NASA management not only misunderstood this concept, but in fact inverted it by using a term denoting an extra level of safety to describe a part that was actually defective and unsafe. Feynman continued to investigate the lack of communication between NASA's management and its engineers, and was struck by management's claim that the risk of catastrophic malfunction on the shuttle was 1 in 10^5; i.e., 1 in 100,000. Feynman immediately realized that this claim was risible on its face; as he described, this assessment of risk would entail that NASA could expect to launch a shuttle every day for the next 274 years without an accident."
Well, it has nothing to do with the topic, but I wouldn't trust a statement "four-in-a million" made by NASA... ;-)
There is no guarantee for a secure life on this planet. Asteroid impacts are a part of the nature, so everybody should be aware of those risks...
There are three objects with higher probability of impact on the list, two of them much larger than Apophis (270 m diameter). Their diameters are 560 m and 780 m.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/
Scroll down to "Objects not recently observed"
Lloyd: Hit me with it! Just give it to me straight! I came a long way just to see you, Mary. The least you can do is level with me. What are my chances?
Mary: Not good.
Lloyd: You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?
Mary: I'd say more like one out of a million.
[pause]
Lloyd: So you're telling me there's a chance... *YEAH!*
I mean, the people who named the asteroid named it after Apophis in SG-1 because they were huge fans. Besides...by 2036, all we'll have to do is open a hyperspace window and send the asteroid through the planet. Just don't try to put a bomb on it, it will turn out to be made of naqadah and make an explosion equivalent to a supernova if that's tried. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naqahdah#Naqahdah
Two-and-a-half football fields? Does this include the stands and the parking lots? They couldn't give it to us in meters?
Wait for it...
Wait for iiiiit...
Waaaaiiit foooorrr iiiiit....
No, missed!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Maybe 4 in a million makes people feel better. I mean, a million is alot bigger than 45000 isn't it!
Personally I think they just stuffed up converting imperial to metric somewhere.
Or put another way, you are 10 times more likely to get Earth-smacked by this big rock than you are to win the lottery. (I never did get why people play the lottery)
Nope. It's Hot Fudge Sunday.
Exactly! These odds are meaningless.
For a start, the numbers are so large (chance so small), that people cannot mentally process them.
Secondly, why is there uncertainty and what does that mean for the outcome?
Are they uncertain about the mass, the velocity, the chance of an impact with another body first?
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
This is just another attempt by "the man" to scare you into giving tax dollars to NASA. Bruce Willis will only be into his _early_ 80's. This whole slippery-slope-asteroid-thing shouldn't be a real concern.
The Apophis asteroid is approximately the size of two-and-a-half football fields
And we mock the ancients for using units of measure like "stadia"!
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by. (Robert Frost, 1916)
Apophis had been downgraded to 4 chances in a million from 22 chances in a million. This new figure is clearly wrong, because it has 6 chances to impact between 2036 and 2103 (see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/a99942.html ). Perhaps this means the actual metric is 6 chances per 1.5 million.
Also of note in the upgraded data is the second of the 2068 near misses, having a 0.00 Earth radius distance. This is likely a statistical artifact caused by the fact that a near miss is a hit (a miss is a miss or it isn't; something that comes close but doesn't hit is a near hit).
Since the distance is zero but the impact probability is 1.1e-07, they have almost certainly determined that it will pass by (and/or impact) almost perfectly edge on. Due to its size being equivalent to 2.5 football fields, and a football field being a 2 dimensional rectangle with no thickness, an edge on impact would have little effect, keeping all 510 megatons of impact energy confined within an area of 270 by 0.000... meters, ie. no area at all. Thus, the impact will have absolutely no effect unless you happen to be standing over that 270 by zero meter line when it comes down on you, or worse, up at you after having passed through the Earth (a zero thickness should be able to pass through the planet like a neutrino).
Hopefully we will also get updated figures on 2007 VK184. It has a 340 in 1 million chance of impact. It gets 4 attempts between 2048 and 2057. Four chances in 9 years gives it 2.25 million years to have its one million attempts, in which time it will only hit Earth 340 times, or once every 2417095.5882352941176470588235294 days. This was calculated with due attention paid to leap years, though it is uncertain at the time of publication whether the frequent legislating of time standards by the US will result in the figure being in standard leap years or daylight savings leap years.
Just to add a minor point of confusion, in case it has been so far missed: the question has been raised regarding the actual size of these objects, as 'football field' is ambiguous, there being two different kinds of 'football' using different size fields. The answer is that it doesn't matter. NASA has already proven themselves to be above and beyond the need for conversion factors, and so they need not differentiate between metric and non-metric football. In their usual excessively polite manner, Canada has repeatedly not pointed out that they too have 'football' similar to the US kind, but with yet another differently sized field. Their reticence is somewhat practical when one considers that fewer people watch Canadian football than watch curling, and nobody outside Canada watches that.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
...in which Michael Fish declared that the massive depression booting it across the Atlantic was /not/ a hurricane and was /not/ about to rip the UK a new arse.
He was wrong.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
While good news for sure.... science believes this was indirectly caused by universal climate change. Sigh...
If we don't do something about solar helium production we're all doomed!
Good move. Perhaps this is one solution to the Fermi Paradox: In every advanced civilisation, some smart-ass kid builds a coke-bottle rocket capable of reaching escape velocity, and uses it to nudge some huge asteroid onto a collision course with the planet full of dorks who hate smart kids.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
The year 2380?
The notation of a SI-prefix inside a number is used in electronics as a decimal separator. I guess it should also be a lower case letter 'k' as well.
I guess the notation was invented because dots tend to fade away on photocopies and a SI unit is less easy to overlook.
Ha! That's probably an old joke but Id never heard it before, nice one.
Whoever downmodded this needs to read some Niven and Pournelle.
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
Now the real question: Has their statistical methodology improved in the last 20 years? Is NASA any less of a PR whore than it was back then?
http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html